


SHOULD OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM 
INCLUDE ACTIVITIES WHOSE 
SPECIAL PURPOSE IS PREP- 
ARATION FOR WAR? 



BY 



JOHN H. FINLEY 



D. 

UL 



of D„? 
14 19 5 



SHOULD OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM 
INCLUDE ACTIVITIES WHOSE 
SPECIAL PURPOSE IS PREP- 
ARATION FOR WAR? 



BY 



JOHN H. FINLEY 



<v 



V <£6 



AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE DEPARTMENT 
OF SUPERINTENDENT op THE NATIONAL EDUCA- 
TION ASSOCIATION AT CINCINNATI, OHIO, 
FEBRUARY 24, 19 15 



SHOULD OUK EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM INCLUDE 
ACTIVITIES WHOSE SPECIAL PURPOSE IS PREPA- 
RATION FOR WAR ? 

If by " our educational system " you mean our elementary and 
secondary schools through which a republic is consciously, sacrifi- 
cially trying to give her eighteen million children each year 
tuition of a longing that in its very transmission becomes a 
prophecy; an institution whose very maintenance is a prayer ut- 
tered by one generation through a thousand hours of every year 
for all that "it could never be"; an institution in which the 
future takes counsel of all the race hope and human failure of the 
past ; 

And if you mean by " war " that hellish thing which is now 
going on in Europe, that vocation of jealousy, envy and hate, 
pursued with every skill that the human mind and hand have 
learned, with every passion that the brute has bequeathed, but 
exposing incidentally every virtue that a god knows ; — 

If you mean by " our educational system " that which attempts 
to express what we most want to keep, out of all human experience 
in the eternity back of us, and what we most desire to hand on 
to those who are to live in the eternity before us — some haunting 
memory of the Creator's purpose for man, some stirring strain 
that drives us, leads us on, that " harries man to love the best " ; 

And if you mean by " war " that which drags one man back to 
the savage even while it lets the divinity in another find its exalted 
eternal expression, that which is strewing with stark and rotting 
corpses fields already twice red with the carnage of Caesar and 
Napoleon, that which, as in the days of Jeremiah, has " taken 
away the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the 
bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones 
and the light of the candle " ; — 

If you mean by " our educational system " not merely curri- 
culums and budgets and licenses and pensions, and miserable lone- 
some rural schools and beautiful urban structures, but the visible, 
organized, disciplined aspiration of a race moving toward some 
higher goal; 

[51 



6 

And if you mean by " war " that which is pictured in the recent 
report in the Alumni Weekly of a Yale man, fresh from the 
trenches in the north of France : " Then the machine guns opened 
on them witheringly, they were falling in hundreds, but on they 
pressed (in dense ranks). They came nearer and the British 
could hear them singing ' The Watch on the Rhine ' — thousands 
of voices, while hundreds carried the air on mouth organs. They 
were getting close. It was time for musketry. The English ob- 
served that only half of the approaching mass wore uniforms. 
' Shoot low,' commanded the English officer, ' they are only boys ; 
aim at their legs.' . . . Only a few reached the trenches " ; 

If you mean by " our educational system " the " substance of 
things hoped for " in a democracy's highest faith ; and if you 
mean by v 'war" that sublimated brutish game played under 
international rules, whose issue is absurdly assumed to determine 
relative values of civilizations ; that greatest tragedy which 
would be the greatest comedy if it were not tragedy — then I 
answer " No ! " " Our educational system " in its basic nation- 
wide disciplines, in its earthwide racial heritages and in its voca- 
tional courses, should not include those whose special purpose is 
preparation for " war." No, by all our hopes for the millions of 
children of all nations, whose ancestral hates we seek to quiet or 
quench, whose parents unite in taxing themselves for the support 
of the schools which we represent here tonight. No, by all 
the innocent sufferings and blightings of the millions of the " gory 
nurse's " children whose fathers and brothers are facing each 
other on hundreds of miles of entrenched borders this same night. 
No, as many times as there are children, here and there. 

But if, holding to the definition I have made of " our educa- 
tional system" (keeping its fences open only on the infinite side), 
you will let me define " war," I am ready to answer " Yes," — 
yes, by all the lives that without hate have been nobly given for 
the love of something higher than one's self; yes, by the " adorable 
faith " of the soldier who from being a mercenary, a paid 
slaughterer, in time became a patriot and a martyr ; yes, by all 
the suffering and struggle and victory of human evolution from 
beasthood to manhood. 

If you will let me define " war " ! And I begin my definition, 



as is the custom of the lexicographer, with the derivation, the 
etymology. My definition of war will stand on my definition of 
militarism, and my definition of militarism goes back through 
the Roman milites, helmeted and bespeared, massed in legions or 
formed in testudines, back to the slopes of Kabulstan and the 
plains of the Jumna and the Ganges, to the places of the mother 
language, the Indo-Germanic, to the Sanskrit word " mil " which 
signified to associate, to unite — back to the primeval soldiers, 
those who joined one another to achieve some common object. 
And, as the most usual common purpose was to attack, or to de- 
fend themselves against other human beings, so it came about 
that in many languages, AngloHSaxon, Anglo-Latin, Spanish, 
Portuguese, French, Old High German and Middle Dutch, the 
word in which they spoke this common object (" guerre," 
"".werra"), had the sound of the wings of the followers of 
Apollyon, which John heard in the Apocalypse, " the sound of 
chariots, and of many horses rushing to war." 

I am a militarist in this pristine ancient Aryan sense. And 
I build my martial system on the same foundation as that which 
all European languages of militarism remember — the assembling, 
the organizing of individual men into milites, militia. 

It is of such a militarism that Kipling sings : a militarism not 
primarily of individual valors but of miracles of organization, a 
militarism in which, as Chesterton says, there is no " epicurean 
corner," no " place of irresponsibility," a militarism which calls 
into specific sacrificial service what each man has to give even if 
it takes him away from his personal prospects, or his personal gain, 
or takes from him his life. 

On my way to France from England just after the declaration of 
war in Europe last summer, I journeyed in a compartment from 
London to the Channel with six or seven Frenchmen and a Russian 
who had left their occupations and families to join their comrades, 
each in his appointed place. One was a maker of meerschaum 
pipes, proud of his skill, but going unquestioningly and without a 
word of comment or complaint except the hope that " it would not 
come to bayonets." At that same time, Doctor Carrel, who had but 
a little time ago received the Nobel Prize, and who had made the 
heart to beat long after the death of its owner, was going to hos- 



8 

pital service in the south of France. And down in Austria there 
was a musician, Fritz Kreisler, the violinist, (whom I heard last 
Saturday night), joining his regiment, later rescued insensible 
from a trench, where he had been ridden down by the Cossacks, 
and even now lame from the spear-thrust. These all tell of a 
martial organization which, in its provident thought, had a 
definite place alike for the meerschaum-pipe maker, the world- 
famed surgeon, and the composer of the " Caprice," and which, if 
you could make your way to the German trenches, would reveal a 
provision for every martial need or emergency, and comfort even, 
only less than omniscient. (One of my former students who has 
just returned from there, tells of officers in the field, in the lull of 
battle, listening by field telephones to music in Berlin.) 

Such a militant organization and with it a specific prediscipline, 
a preparatory training ! (And preparation for war is war, even as 
preparation for life is life. ) I think I am almost ready now for the 
landwehr and a landsturm, a continuation school in which each 
man shall, apart from his vocation, or quitting even for a time his 
vocation — as every able-bodied man of France, Germany, Austria, 
Italy — undergo physical, mental, disciplines for the sake of the 
State, for the sake of the race. 

Five years ago, after reading William James's essay on " The 
Moral Equivalent of War," I wrote him that I was prepared to re- 
cruit a regiment of volunteers for his army, which, he urged, 
should be conscripted. Perhaps you recall that most stirring of 
martial documents, put out as peace propaganda, in which he advo- 
cates the conscription of the luxurious classes to be sent to the coal 
and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets, to dish washing, 
clothes washing and window washing, to road building and tunnel 
building, to foundries and stoke-holes, to the frames of sky 
scrapers, in order that they might know " the sour and hard foun- 
dations of the higher life," and feel that they belonged to a col- 
lectivity superior in some ideal aspect to themselves, something for 
which they were ready to pay a blood-tax. T was not ready then 
for conscription, having memory of an experience as a boy in see- 
ing citizens in this very valley work out poll taxes on the roads. 
But when I see the miracles wrought by martial organization, I 
am impatient at times that we have to wait for the conscription of 
our individual ideals. 



When journeying through a pass in the Jura mountains a few 
years ago one March day, I saw silhouetted against the cold even- 
ing sky, the figures of soldiers climbing along a ridge to their fort- 
ress at the end of a day's marching or scouting. In Florence I 
saw troop after troop crossing and recrossing the Arno to and from 
the hill of San Miniato where Angelo's David looks across the 
city to the Apennines. At Siena I was waked by the tramp of 
soldiers' feet. In the place of the Caesars I saw crowds held 
in by lines of soldiers, while kings from north and south passed. 
Everywhere soldiers, and always was rising this thought, " If 
these men, compelled to military service " — useless as it seemed 
to be then except in its disciplines — " if they could only be trained 
and employed to fight against the real foes of a city, a nation, a 
race, what a power would be released for the general good ! " 

And here my definition of war emerges upon battlefields of 
promethean yet newest heroisms (if indeed there are such places 
as battlefields to be left to history). Even while I was making 
this definition in that recurring thought which came to me in Italy 
and France, someone, I have learned only within the last few days, 
was at that very time framing a like definition in Russia : 

" Our awfulest enemies, the elements and germs and insect 
destroyers, attack us every minute without cease, yet we murder 
one another as if we were out of our senses. Death is ever on the 
watch for us, and we think of nothing but to snatch a few patches 
of land! About 5,000,000,000 days of work go every year to 
the displacement of boundary lines. Think of what humanity 
could obtain if that prodigious effort were devoted to fighting our 
real enemies, the noxious species and our hostile environment. 
We should conquer them in a few years. The entire globe would 
turn into a model farm. Every plant would grow for our use. 
The savage animals would disappear, and the infinitely tiny 
animals would be reduced to impotence by hygiene and cleanli- 
ness. The earth would be conducted according to our convenience. 
In short, the day men realize who their worst enemies are, they 
will form an alliance against them, they will cease to murder one 
another like wild beasts from sheer folly. Then they will be 
the true rulers of the planet, the lords of creation." 

But I have found a more recent and effective statement of 
the thought that was flung across the sky of many an earth mind 
by the Philosopher James before he went away, the thought that 



10 

troubled me whenever I heard the measured tramp of feet or 
saw the bayonet in Trance or Italy, the thought that at the same 
time was stirring this Russian, unknown to me, to cry against the 
war philosophies of Gumplowitz, something that has at last got 
from the philosopher's study into the street ■ — even as the 
philosophies of the European professors have reached the triggers 
of the peasants' rifles and made men different from all other 
animals, in that they prey upon their own species. 

" But where does the martial spirit come in " — says the cynic. 
And the American philosopher, after James's own spirit, replies : 
" The Nation has never made us look at it in the right way." 
There i3 nothing " animating about wallowing in a trench or 
lugging a haversack and a heavy gun all day, except as it is a 
part of an organized national enterprise." — " Well, then, 
organize your national enterprise against nature instead of the 
Belgians or Canadians." As it has been since the Titans fought 
the gods, " Nature is our implacable enemy. Russians aren't, 
Germans aren't." 

We have too much softened our vocabulary and our spirits. 
We speak of " public service " and of " doing good " when we 
ought to be making, such war, fighting evil and enduring hard- 
ships. We ought, as some old militant Christian said, to put on 
our armor and not take it off till we put on our shrouds. For 
life is not service. Life is struggle alone, struggle together. 
Life is war. 

I discovered when following the Mississippi river to the Gulf 
a few years ago, that it was the War Department that was watch- 
ing its every movement, that was carrying on constant battle with 
floods, shoals, erosions, burrowing animals and the clouds which 
every year send the army of waters down the valley with the 
power of 60,000,000 horses. It is the War Department that has 
dug the Panama Canal, that has made some regions accessible, 
that has made others habitable, that has stayed pestilence and 
ministered most effectively to cities overwhelmed by disaster. It 
is to the War Department that we turn in our extreme emergencies 
— flood, fire, famine and earthquake. It is the War Department 
that is illustrating how we may fight our real and common race 
foes. 



11 

And I would have the conservation of health and the direction 
of education conceived of as functions of the War Department, 
scientifically, austerely administered for the common good. 
Kitchener's letter to the expeditionary force going into France 
is the best possible literature for us to use who are directing the 
expeditionary forces which this generation is sending to battle 
in the thirties and forties and fifties of this century. Here is 
a meeting of the general staff, Generals Maxwell and Schaeffer, 
Claxton and Flagg-Young, Jordan and Snyder, who must largely 
determine their far movements. Would we might commandeer 
every luxury, every degenerate habit, every extravagant whim, 
every waste, to support this army. Would we might use one 
slice of bread for our sandwich instead of two slices if we could 
thereby make them fight more effectively against ignorance, 
disease, intemperance, incompetence, sloth, passion, and fight for 
those things without which human existence were a colossal jest. 
Till we have taxed ourselves for schools as Europe is taxing her- 
self for wars, we shall not have done too much. 

But if you say that this is all Utopian, and that without war, 
as it is illustrated in the trenches and on the mine-spread seas 
we can not preserve or foster that priceless spirit of courage, 
honor, disinterestedness, contempt of life, I would point to the 
soldier, Colonel Goethals, who has divided the continent, and 
the soldier, Colonel Gorgas, who kept away the hostile diseases 
while this Hercules was at work ; I would point to Pasteur, who 
dragged around with him a half -paralyzed body for twenty years 
and more, fighting microbes, when he might have been living in 
Horatian ease; I would point to the martial geologist Van Hise, 
to the martial sanitarian General Wood, to the martial peace- 
maker Jane Addams. I could, in protesting proof, point to 
thousands, all the way from the invincible endurer Prometheus 
who gave fire to men, to that gentle fighter, Richard Watson 
Gilder, who wrote thi3 for me not long before his death : 

' Twas said : " When roll of drum and battle's roar 
Shall cease upon the earth, Oh, then no more 

" The deed, the race, of heroes in the land." 

But scarce that word was breathed when one small hand 



12 

Lifted victorious o'er a giant wrong 

That had its victims crushed through ages long; 

Some woman set her pale and quivering face, 
Firm as a rock, against a man's disgrace ; 

A little child suffered in silence lest 

His savage pain should wound a mother's breast ; 

Some quiet scholar flung his gauntlet down 

And risked, in Truth's great name, the synod's frown; 

A civic hero, in the calm realm of laws, 

Did that which suddenly drew a world's applause; 

And one to the pest his lithe young body gave 
That he a thousand thousand lives might save. 

I am not so unpractical as not to know that we shall have to 
prepare for protection, that for a time we shall have to train some 
men to shoot other men. I have had that training myself and I 
approve the temperate and sensible program, so far as I under- 
stand it, of such practical anti-militarists as General Wood and 
President Schurman. But what I do contend for, beyond this, 
or in spite of this, is that we must not turn our great public school 
system into recruiting stations or barracks for the idea that war, 
as illustrated in Belgium, Poland, and Servia, is the supreme ex- 
pression, or the necessary school, of a nation's valors or of a virile 
world civilization. 



I had come to the end of my address when a morning's cable- 
gram from the edge of the European war brought me the summar- 
izing, prophetic, graphic epilogue of what I have been attempting 
to say. It may not be true, but it intimates how what I have been 
saying may come true. The cable is as follows : 

Berne, Feb. 22 {Dispatch to The London Morning 
Post). — "All the young men in Germany between the 
ages of 17 and 20 who have failed to volunteer for the 



13 

army and can not give an adequate excuse are now being 
called out to serve as an untrained Landsturm. The 
older boys and girls, with the consent of their parents, 
are to be employed in farm work this Spring, Summer 
and Autumn in the East Prussian provinces as well as 
in Bavaria, for which purpose they will be excused from 
school attendance." 

They are to go to the farms. They too are to fight for their 
country and in the field ; fight for it with the plough and the har- 
row, the planter and the harvester, the insect exterminator and the 
fertilizer. And some day all physical war will be as this. The 
Landsturm of Fear and Envy and Hate will become the Land- 
sturm of disciplined, scientific, aspiring, industrial and invincible 
struggle for man's supremacy over earth, sea, sky and self! 

With that definition of " war," I am ready to say that the 
schools should, must prepare for it, body, mind and soul. 



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